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Media, the Internet, Yellow Pages, and Your Business

If you are reading this article, chances are you could use a
little extra money. With the advent of the internet and the
migration of advertising dollars from print to electronic (and
this time, it's the real thing, I swear! Not one of those 1999
tech busts!...Seriously!) If you own a small business today, you
look at many advertising mediums. The majority of these mediums
lump themselves into 2 categories, creative or direct.

Creative has always been the crapshoot for the small business
owner. A sales rep walks into your business, espousing the
greater good of television or radio advertising, quickly moves
past the ratings, viewers etc and into the sexiness of hearing
your name at 6:57am Monday, Thursday and Saturday if you are
watching station X or listening to station Y. If this product
didn't work, a Super Bowl commercial price tag wouldn't make
headlines every December (for how much Geico paid) or late
February (to hear which is most memorable). The key with creative
is frequency. If you have realistic budget for frequency, you can
make the phone ring with a creative campaign. If you have that
budget you probably aren't reading this article. Realistically
speaking, you don't have a ton of money to risk on creative
advertising effectiveness, haven't backed it up with a call to
action, and you need, pound for pound, the least amount of
advertising money possible, with the most phone calls?

Enter direct advertising. Classified sections in newspapers,
they make your phone ring, if you're selling something people
want. (For the record, advertising in the sports section of your
local paper is creative advertising (people don't go to page 5 of
the sports to regularly check out the latest prices on used
cars.) Classified advertising is in the process of going from the
newspaper industry's cash cow to taking it on the chin from eBay
(ever heard of it?) and even more attractive small town slugger,
Craigslist (you go Craig!). If you're business pumps out used
cars by the pound, chances are you, or your salesmen are using
these two websites to start realizing savings from Rupert Murdoch
and his yacht-owning cronies. Even the best of eBay or
Craigslist, however, doesn't put much of a dent in your P&L
statement if you are service based like a contractor, or general
retail, like a bookstore.

Enter the yellow pages?Pound for pound, no other medium makes
the phone ring at your business like the good old fashioned
yellow pages. Throw down your money, and answer the phone. You
already know that. So do all the TV stations, radio stations, and
newspapers in the country. The best protected advertising budget
in any small business is the yellow page budget. Yellow pages are
the scourge of the other guys. How many radio sales reps will
walk into your store after you started your advertising campaign
and say, "Tom, your $1,000 invested with my station this week got
you 48 phone calls?" (If you find a station like that please send
me the phone number, and I retract everything I said earlier)
When someone wants a plumber, a pool boy, a new pool, or a
divorce attorney for getting the new pool without his wife's
approval, they pick up the weathered old yellow pages, leaf
through a few adverts, and call someone that sells what they
need.

So, am I telling you to advertise in the yellow pages?,,, Not
so fast Skippy?First, let's look at the cost of the yellow
pages,?You want the phone to ring in Miami, and you're a plumber?
Better be ready to pony up some serious cash?say $3-4k per month.
In Miami, the average cost of a service call could be around $65.
If you don't have a crew, that ad needs to generate 61 calls to
break even, not including the employee cost, travel costs etc.
Not so bad? How many calls did you need to generate those 61
service calls? Did you go see everyone that called you? I would
guess, for a contractor, you might get lucky and have a 50% close
rate?122 calls?to break even. Don't forget to pay yourself?200
calls. Depressed? Better be glad you don't sell shoes. The same
ad would generate a much lower close rate, and you need to sell
an dump truck of shoes every month!

What's my point? Enter the ELECTRONIC yellow pages?No print
bill, real time changes, and guess where all those print yellow
pages are putting their money these days? BellSouth and SBC just
paid $100M (you know, $100,000,000) for a new domain name, and
combined their "competing" forces to make a better entry in the
fray, thinking that you might remember yellowpages.com better
than smartpages.com or realpages.com. (Makes you wonder where
Google fits into the old branding and name recognition game.)
Verizon seemed to get the concept a little better with
superpages.com by aligning with Mr. Gates over at MSN right
around the time Al Gore was inventing the internet. Getting back
to the point, the internet yellow pages are going to do to print
yellow pages what eBay and Craigslist have done to the newspaper
companies. No paper, no ink, usage climbing (for electronic
yellow pages, usage is climbing to as high as 70% of online
searching, and buying) and real-time, do-it-yourself advertising.
Advents such as community ranking, mini-sites, toolbars, pay per
click, pay per call, and just about every way possible to pay for
performance, track performance, and see what other buyers of your
goods or services thought of your business. Due to the ever
changing, "who's in first place" of the internet, there has yet
to be determined if there is a Lance Armstrong in this race. Our
own company USdirectory.com, via its partnerships, and investment
into technology, is looking to become a late entry, blue-ribbon
bearer. At this point, it's too early to clearly point out which
one, or all, or none, of these companies will do to yellow pages
what Google did to global search. That being said, even Google
doesn't reflect enough tenure to ensure its own top position.

Who wins?? You do, the business owner. Technology is about to
reduce your advertising budget the way Southwest and JetBlue
changed the airline industry. Your customer base, as they migrate
to the internet as vehicle of choice, will reach you at lower
price points, and in greater volume, then ever before. Your
mission, should you choose to accept, in investing in the right
mix, at the right point, and try to cater not only to your
existing radius of business, but around the planet with new and
specialized niches?but that's another story.

Heavy marketing of prescription opioid drugs to doctors was linked to high death rates in an analysis of recent data published Friday. Between 2013 and 2016, ...

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